Music

Bridging Past and Present, Duke Performances Announces its Tremendous New Season

Eighth Blackbird, who perform with Bonnie "Prince" Billy's Will Oldham

The 2016–17 performing arts season in the Triangle is shaping up to be a doozy. Carolina Performing Arts set the bar high with a schedule as broad and deep as anything they’ve had in recent years, with a particularly strong selection of orchestras, dance troupes, and international music. And the North Carolina Symphony continues to dive into the music of the twenty-first century with sympathetic works from the canon.

But, somehow, Duke Performances has managed to blow them all away with the season they announced yesterday. It seemed to take me forever just to finish browsing their schedule. Unsurprisingly, the major strength is music, particularly from smaller groups.

The more traditional classical list is, well, more traditional. Almost all of the chamber music performances feature at least one work from Beethoven, Mozart, Schubert, or Brahms, played by a solid set of performers including the St. Lawrence Quartet and Christian Tetzlaff. Most noteworthy will be Ian Bostridge and Thomas Adés’s journey through the complicated depths of Schubert’s Winterreise. There’s also a nicely diverse set of vocal music that spans a millennium.

Ageless saxophonist Charles Lloyd, ageless drummer Billy Hart, and the aforementioned Branford Marsalis and Christian McBride lead the jazz side of things. In addition, Rez Abbasi will make up his ice-hampered show from last year. Antonio Sanchez will perform his epic score for the film Birdman.Anat Cohen and Cécile McLorin Savant will do their things, and Gerald Clayton will continue Duke Performances’s tradition of commissioning expansive works about Southern culture.